Impossible is nothing: Entrepreneurship in Cuba and small firms’ business performance

Julio Cerviño, Sylvie Chetty and Oscar Martín Martín

Journal of Small Business Management, 2025, vol. 63, issue 2, 495-527

Abstract: While entrepreneurs play a crucial role in shaping the business environment in transitional economies, there is a lack of studies that involve such contexts. Cuba represents an idiosyncratic collectivist economy that is gradually transforming into a socialist market economy, and there is a dearth of literature on entrepreneurship in Cuba. Understanding business performance drivers and challenges faced by small firms in this context may have important theoretical and practical implications. We explore the determinants of small firms’ business performance in Cuba. We combine a capabilities and institutional perspective on entrepreneurship to explain small firms’ business performance in this turbulent transitional market. Specifically, we suggest that managerial capabilities, supply-chain problems, and institutional factors explain small firms’ business performance. We contribute to both the small firm and entrepreneurship literature by contextualizing capabilities and institutional perspectives to identify the critical role played by managerial capabilities and supply-chain problems in economies where supply is constrained.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00472778.2024.2322991 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ujbmxx:v:63:y:2025:i:2:p:495-527

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ujbm20

DOI: 10.1080/00472778.2024.2322991

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Small Business Management is currently edited by Eric Liguori

More articles in Journal of Small Business Management from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().